Watson: The dying-technology charity pitch

Sorted letters are seen at the Muenchen Nord distribution centre of German postal service Deutsche Post in Munich, southern Germany, on December 18, 2013. During the pre-Christmas period, postmen and employees working at the sorting centres have their hands full with Christmas and New Year's cards. CHRISTOF STACHE / GETTY

Christmas is coming. I know this because several charities I support and several others I don’t have been sending me sample packets of Christmas cards. At least this is better than address labels, either plain paper ones with backing you lick or fancy peel-off ones showing cute wild animals or pastoral scenes from nowhere near my postal zone. A recent offering included 93 such labels. I have several hundred piled up in a kitchen drawer. When sending a letter, I’m always at a loss for a stamp but never for an address label.

Not that I send many letters. I don’t think I’m atypical or especially misanthropic — for an economist, at least — but these days I send about five a year in total. Do Canadian charities not understand we now have things called email and the Internet? I correspond with friends, do my banking and pay virtually all my bills online. I read my newspapers and magazines on a tablet computer. For the first time since before I was born, the Watson family soon won’t be getting a copy of the New Yorker, which used to call itself, immodestly but not inaccurately, “the world’s best magazine.” I kept up hard-copy delivery the last couple of years because I wanted it lying around the house for my sons to pick up and become addicted to during any downtime from more typical teenage obsessions, just as I did at their age. Now that they’re both off at school there’s no need. Reading magazines on a tablet is perfectly satisfactory and delivery is instantaneous, with no delays due to snow days, strikes or random error.

Speaking of Canada Post, have the charities sending us address labels by the hundreds not noticed that stamps now cost $1? To be fair, that’s if you buy one at a time. If you buy a pack they’re “only” 85 cents. But that’s 85 cents per card for the dozens of cards the charities seem to expect us to send out. When I was a kid, sending Christmas cards was a really big deal, both for us kids, who were always wanting to see who’d be sending us one in return, and in society at large, which was populated by many more stay-at-home moms, who organized the mailings.

I used to send out dozens. But, dating myself, stamps were six cents each then. The Bank of Canada Inflation Calculator says things that cost six cents in 1965 cost 45 cents today if their price has gone up the almost eight-fold (!) that prices have increased on average. But that’s 45 cents, not 85 cents. The real price of a stamp has virtually doubled over that time, while the real price of sending messages electronically has fallen by about 20 gazillion.

No, it’s not very personal to send e-mails at Christmas, not even if you attach one of those clever seasonal animations. But a personal message with comments pertinent to the recipients may actually have more impact than you and your kids’ signature on a glossy Christmas scene. Or snow scene, if you’re careful about making religious assumptions. Or no-snow scene if you want to make a climate-change point. I’m pretty sure there’s no app yet that allows you to personalize your e-mail messages without your actual participation in the composition, so a message just for them should mean something even if they can’t display it on their mantlepiece.

I’m an economist married to an accountant. We make our charitable donations online every Dec. 31. And though doubtless we could give more, we try to be generous and dependable. You’d think by 2014 Canada’s charities, maybe with Google’s help, would have picked up on our fastidious giving habits and understood that all we want in return is a tax receipt, maybe an electronic thank-you and some evidence they’re putting the money to good use. On this last point the regular deluge of dying-technology pitches into our mailbox is not reassuring.

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